Astoria Hotel Reaches Over Half Million Facebook Users

While people may not necessarily be going to Facebook with travel intentions in mind, it is increasingly a medium to reach people by both targeting potential guests and creating awareness. This week the 66 room Astoria Hotel Antwerp outshone all our previous campaigns and reached just under half a million Facebook users when their competition went viral.

General Manager France and her team have been actively cultivating the hotels Facebook following for some time now. Regular posts include anecdotes, hotel news and monthly competitions. Last December they posted a story that Santa Claus disappeared in Antwerp and the Astoria team went to find him so he could make his deliveries in time for December 6th.

This Wednesday afternoon France posted a new competition for fans to guess the value of her odd coin collection she was about to take to the bank to win a free night stay at the Astoria. Normally Astoria Facebook competitions get about 200 entries (which is respectable for a hotel of this size and style) but something sparked fans interest and by Friday afternoon 12,473 people had entered and the notifications on their friends’ feeds meant the Astoria name was seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

As well as bringing brand awareness to a large audience, the exposure has boosted their Facebook fan base allowing the hotel to keep a direct line of communication open with the new fans and also increased their ranking in the complex Facebook algorithms ensuring they will appear more readily in Facebook Graph Search.

Congratulations to France and the Astoria Hotel Antwerp team, I’m very pleased your innovative and engaging activities have produced such a great result and boost for the hotel name.